One thing is understanding the adversary, “the hazard,” and what and when it will appear and how significant that disaster will be.
We should never underestimate the ability of the hazard to impact our community in both size and breadth of impact. This was the issue that Japan had with its great earthquake and tsunami. It underestimated the potential size of the earthquake threat and then also the subsequent tsunami.
It is better to do “worst-case planning” and not sugarcoat the possible impacts of the hazard. Doing so creates “surprises” and accusations that you were not up front with what might happen. I’m not suggesting that you “make things up,” but you should not hesitate to lay out the impacts and don’t hold back because certain members of the audience won’t like what you have to say.
Next is making sure you have an accurate assessment of your own capabilities. This was perhaps the biggest mistake made in Afghanistan. It was believed that the Afghan army, being well-equipped and having received decades of training, would be a capable fighting force. The bottom line is that they did not fight in any significant way.
Which comes to how you assess your community and regional capabilities to respond to a major disaster. Everyone has a tendency to overrate their own capabilities. In many, if not most, cases, communities will never have stress-tested their ability to respond to a major disaster, especially a catastrophic one.
You need to accurately project your readiness in a realistic way to the people you report to. They need to understand the full scope of the risks they face and make informed decisions about how much they will work to resource the emergency management capabilities. This is often a balancing act with the budget.
The risks need to be clearly communicated. Doing so might not save your job when the catastrophic disaster appears, but you will have done your job in keeping the boss informed.
Don’t expect you will escape blame for a disaster that is bigger than what others expected to happen or the ability of your organization and the whole of government to respond to.
In our world, sometimes “it is what it is.”
